Active Hard Drive Partitions

Can you have two or more active partitions/hard drives on a single PC? What are the general rules about having active partitions?

Thanks in Advance?

 

Easiest way to do this is format the drive with all other drives cables unplugged.

There is a limit of M$ to only 4 active partitions total if memory serves. This limitation is imposed by M$. Formatting each drive with others unattached allows you to have as many active as you would like.

Using other tools to format also gets around this.

Sul.

 

I may be wrong but I thought a disk can have only 1 active partition available out of the maximum 4 primary partitions.

 

Yes!

You can have one active partition per attached disk - see 'Notes' here.

Isn't the MS limit only about the number of primary partitions per disk?

philby

 

Yes, that is correct. I was confusing primary with active.

Sul.

 

A hard disk can have maximum four primary partitions out of which one will be active. If you have two HDDs, then you will have eight primary partitions and two active partitions (one on each). According to my knowledge, you cannot have more than one active partition even with third party tools (I have used many).